


A Particular Kind of Hell

by Sholio



Category: The Invisible Man (TV 2000)
Genre: Episode Tag, Friendship, Gen, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-27
Updated: 2014-11-27
Packaged: 2018-02-27 04:57:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2679965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one understands. No one can. (Episode tag to "Flowers for Hobbes") For my h/c bingo "sacrifice" square.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Particular Kind of Hell

**Author's Note:**

> I'm rewatching this show and an episode tag happened. Oops?

He remembers some of it. None of it. All of it.

The verbal stuff, the math, the connections and all the _understanding_ , blazing cometlike across the horizons of his mind ... that's all gone. Well, not quite gone; the worst part is that, like he told Darien, it's _there_ , it's just that he can't understand it anymore. Like a dream, half-remembered, the details slipping away when you try to hold on.

But other things are crystal clear. Physical memory, visual memory, recorded in living 3D eidetic snapshots -- and how does he even know the word _eidetic_ ; he's pretty sure he didn't before ... his minefield of a brain is loaded with brand new tripwires: words, associations, memories ....

He's pretty sure he had a photographic memory under the influence of the retrovirus, and while a lot of it is gone now ( _the new cells will atrophy and die_ ) he's still got snapshots, vivid and perfect. Humiliatingly perfect. He remembers a lot of things he doesn't want to remember, complete in every detail, sight and smell and sound.

_I'm pretty sure there's one thing about me you don't know._

Yeah, thanks kid, thanks for fucking nothing; thanks for a direct and tangible demonstration of the one thing about Darien Fawkes that Bobby never _wanted_ to know. (Well, okay, there are plenty of other things he didn't want to know. Two guys don't have a whole lot of secrets from each other after sharing stakeouts and hotel rooms and long-distance drives.) But this ...

He never wanted a direct demonstration of the fact that Darien would die for him.

Chose to die for him.

Would have died for him.

Stupid ex-con punk. Why he couldn't have turned out to be the selfish, screwed-up waste of air he'd seemed like he was when Bobby first met him --

Well, okay, Bobby wouldn't go back to those days, doesn't want to go back. Darien is who he is: a big overgrown affectionate puppy, a snarky asshole, and a guy who dumped a syringe full of lethal retrovirus into his bloodstream because he hoped it would save his friend.

_You'd die for me, Bobby._

Well yeah. Goes without saying. It's the job.

_Not because it's your job or your code. Because you're my friend._

Fuck you, kid, not your call. You don't get to decide that.

You don't get to decide ...

And that's what it comes down to on some level, that's why he's been walking around with a burned-to-nothing fuse every time he's near Darien for the last couple of days, and Darien's been giving him space because shit, _everyone's_ walking on eggshells around him, everyone knows Bobby's just gone through a particular kind of hell (but it didn't feel like hell, it felt like flying) and Darien dragged him back to Earth, and Bobby ...

... he doesn't know whether to hug the sentimental idiot or punch his lights out. That's what he doesn't know.

It's just that he holds onto sanity with his fingernails at the best of times. Doesn't always knows what's real and what's not. He takes pills to keep himself on something approaching an even keel, which isn't what other people call sane, but it's his normal, Bobby Hobbes normal, and he's had a lot of practice at balancing with both feet in exactly the right spots on that teeter-totter.

And then this thing fucked his brain chemistry to hell, and Darien yanked him back to (some form of) reality, and now he's wading through shit, hip-deep in it, and no one _gets it._ No one would. Push a button and he's fixed, right? But he's spent a lot of time learning the landscape of his head, where the bad places are, what he has to walk around, what he can lock away and what he can take out.

The best thing he can compare it to (and this doesn't feel like a comparison he would've made before either, not a comparison he would've thought to make) is being blind and having everything in his house in a particular place, so he can move through it gracefully without tripping over stuff. And then that fucking retrovirus _moved things around_ , and Claire and Darien put it back, or tried to, but it's still all over the place -- not a lot different, but enough he can feel it, in an uncomfortable way that makes him feel like his mental furniture is rearranging itself behind his back.

Maybe it is.

That virus _changed him._ It's not about Dick and Jane on two trains traveling towards each other at a hundred point five miles per hour or whatever. It's about knowing how to navigate through his day without turning into a basket case, and now he _doesn't_ know anymore, so he has to walk extra careful and watch for shiny new tripwires camouflaged in dirt where a safe path used to be and just ... just ...

It'll get better, he knows. It's like changing meds: he just needs to work out the shape of his new mental landscape and figure out how to walk through it. And he _can't_ regret giving Claire the cure to save Darien's life. He'll never have it in him to regret that.

He's just ... tired.

*

Also deeply tired of Fawkes, at times.

Like now, when he's trying to read and a paper airplane hits him in the ear. Bobby bats it away without looking.

"Earth to Hobbes," Darien says. A certain amount of surreptitious rustling indicates that he's folding another one.

"Some of us are trying to work here, Fawkes."

Another day, another case, and the case files they're supposed to be looking at are spread out between them on the conference table. Darien, true to form, spent about five minutes flipping through file folders before getting bored. Now he's just a loose sprawl of long arms and legs, slouched down in his chair, folding paper airplanes out of any paperwork in reach.

"C'mon, we're not getting anywhere like this." Darien drapes himself backwards over the back of his chair -- how does he get his spine to _do_ that? -- and lazily launches his latest airplane towards the ceiling. "Let's get out of here. Get something to eat. Brain food, you know?" 

There's an audible snap at the end of that sentence as Darien tries to bite it off too late. Bobby has to run it back in his head to figure out what Darien was reacting to, and he grits his teeth. He's sick to death of the two of them acting like he's going to either cave in or snap if they say the wrong thing to him.

He's sick of everything, really. 

He tries to focus on the page in front of him, but that just makes it worse, because there's a part of his brain telling him this should be easier than it is. He's just read the same paragraph four times, every time feeling the words that he's trying to read slide right out of his brain. He's never been good at picking up information that way. He's a talker. A schmoozer. He's _good_ at people, he really is, at least when he's not scaring them off by being a fucking headcase; he can interview witnesses and bum around picking up clues and put cases together.

He's _not_ stupid. At least he keeps telling himself that. He's just not good at this kind of thing. Not like Fawkes and the Keep are.

But for a short, glorious, soaring time, he was.

Another paper airplane swoops in for a perfectly aimed landing on top of the paragraph he's trying to read.

Bobby grabs it, crumples it, and throws it across the table as hard as he can. Darien, looking startled, ducks just in time to avoid being pasted in the forehead. The ball of paper bounces off the wall to join the paper airplanes scattered on the floor.

Bobby takes some small satisfaction from the fact that Eberts is going to have an aneurysm when he sees what they've done to his files.

"Whoa," Darien says, and stares at him, half wounded puppy and half speculative. "You okay?"

"No!" Bobby snarls at him. "No, I am not _okay,_ damn it!"

He's not expecting what happens, which is Darien abruptly sitting forward in his chair and slapping both palms on the table with a gleeful "Yes!"

Startled out of his temper tantrum, Bobby says, "What?"

"You're not okay." Darien stabs a finger at him. "I can see it, Claire can see it -- the only person who won't admit it is you."

"So you're gonna, what, pester me into saying so?" The thought crosses his mind that Darien must have been an amazingly insufferable younger brother. Bobby feels a brief pang of commiseration with Kevin, may the poor sucker rest in peace.

"If that's what it takes."

He wants to be angry, but the anger's all seeped out of him, leaving him weary to the bone. He slides the papers away with a flattened-out hand, because it gives him something to do other than look at Darien's too-open, too-sympathetic face. "Yeah, okay, so maybe I'm having coping issues. My whole life's a big mess of coping issues, Fawkes, you haven't noticed that?"

"Right, and I've got a gland in my brain that makes me turn into a homicidal maniac if I don't get regular hits of a drug I'm apparently addicted to." Darien's standing up now -- Bobby can tell by the direction of his voice, but refuses to look up. "Not to mention being a terminal screw-up even before that. I don't know _anything_ about coping issues."

Bobby doesn't mean to laugh, but he can't help it. Gallows humor. "Dunno what the Keep's doing here. She's the only person in this place who isn't a complete basket case."

"Eh, I think she's just as messed up as the rest of us." Darien circles the conference table to loom over Bobby, who still refuses to look at him. "She's just better at hiding it."

"Great, go psychoanalyze _her_ , then."

Darien prods him in the shoulder. "Come on, man. Let's get lunch. Better yet, let's find a place that serves alcohol and spend the afternoon getting smashed on the Agency's dime while bitching about our sad, pathetic lives."

"Yeah, good luck ever getting reimbursed for that," Bobby mutters, but he lets himself be prodded, nudged, and eventually half-dragged out of the chair.

"I'll buy, then." Darien throws a long arm around his neck, giving him the option of being tugged out the door or getting strangled. Bobby gives up and comes gracefully. A few paper airplanes crumple underfoot with satisfying little papery squishing sounds.

It's not okay, he thinks. Not quite. Not yet. _He's_ not okay.

But maybe he will be.


End file.
